Now We Rise - COP28 March

On Saturday 9^th December, we stood with XR Leicester, Leicester Animal Rights, Green Guardians Leicester and Climate Action Leicester for a march through the streets of Leicester to mark the International Day of Action for Climate Justice.

Speeches were made at Leicester’s Clock Tower and then we marched to the Town Hall Square where an aerial picture was taken. People were dressed in black to represent an oil slick as they asked world leaders meeting at COP28 in Dubai to stop drilling for new oil: ‘Rosebank Oil Wells’ has recently been approved. We don’t need to drill for new oil we have enough for our needs already.

Thousands of people across the world rose up on Saturday; people from 4 continents, 50 countries, 300 locations – standing together to raise awareness of the need for action to stop global temperatures increasing more than 1.5 C.

Melanie Wakley from FoE said “We want promises that mean something. Promises that stand for a reality of things we can achieve to save our planet from environmental disaster and promises that are made and are kept, not watered down once everyone goes home from Dubai.”

The march ended with the chant from XR Leicester “We want action! Action for the Climate! Action for Nature! We want Climate Justice! The people have spoken – Now We Rise!”

Melanie Wakley

#NowWeRise

The Mind of a Bee written by Lars Chiltka and reviewed by the Green Book Group

This is a fascinating book delving into the mind of a bee supported by hours/years of scientific research.

The book begins with the introduction of ‘What’s it like to be a Bee’ discussing a bees first journey after it leaves its nest – describing how they have to immediately remember their route home and also how they can make choices – so everything in their world is not decided by innate priorities. They can choose their own predispositions. It is this first bit of information that makes you immediately realise how clever bees are especially when the author describes how they also communicate in the hive in the dark – sorting out who does what job – just by using their pheromones.

The book itself – although fascinating – does contain a lot of scientific knowledge though and assumes that everyone has that knowledge. I wonder if some of this technical detail could have been simplified slightly to make it more accessible to all readers.

The last chapter in the book about why we need to conserve bees is definitely well worth reading. The last paragraph of the ‘Afterword’ leaves you with thoughts to ponder on…..

‘The ancient bees honey might well have provided the necessary carbohydrates for our ancestors’ costly brain enlargement, and might thus have fuelled the evolution of the human mind.

We owe bees. Act accordingly.’

A very thought provoking read about the value of such a small insect to humankind.

By Melanie Wakley

Climate Emergency Action Plan consultation - respond now!

Leicester City Council are currently consulting on their new Climate Emergency Action Plan, which will cover the next five years until 2028. The consultation is open until Sunday 28^th January 2024 and you can read the consultation documents here. We are writing a detailed response from Leicester Friends of the Earth but it will have more impact if as many people and organisations as possible respond to the consultation. You can complete a survey at the link above or simply send an email to sustainability@leicester.gov.uk with your thoughts.

Here are our suggestions for the key points to include:

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Although there are many good actions included in the new plan, there are also too many points without any defined targets, so that there is no way of measuring whether the Council is making progress towards reaching net zero by 2030. There are also too many ‘actions’ listed which are in fact only plans to make plans. These are not actions and should not be listed as such.

The Council

The Council recognises that the most impactful actions they could take to reduce the carbon emissions of their own buildings are to retrofit insulation, install heat pumps and connect more buildings to the district heating networks. However, insulation and connections to district heating are not mentioned in the actions listed in this section. There is only a plan to make a plan! Why not start trying to fund those projects immediately, while creating the roadmap? When we are facing a climate emergency, we haven’t got two years to waste in only writing the plan.

Housing

The ongoing programme of insulating council homes is good but nowhere near ambitious enough. There needs to be a target to retrofit all council owned and managed homes, as well as a target to get all homes in the private rented sector up to standard. We would also like to understand what more will be done to encourage privately owned homes to retrofit, as they make up a significant proportion of the city’s housing stock.   

Business, public services and community

The tree planting and Tiny Forests projects happening on school grounds are excellent but they could be more ambitious; aiming to plant five more Tiny Forests by 2028 is only one per year! Could the Council aim to plant a Tiny Forest at every school that has sufficient green space within the next 5 years? That would be a significant number of trees and ensure that most children in Leicester had access to a Tiny Forest.

Transport

To make active travel more attractive we need to find ways of reducing traffic levels, so that it is safer to walk and cycle. One of the key factors driving increases in road traffic is light goods vehicles, driven by online shopping.  This is recognised in government statistics but not addressed in this plan (apart from with a plan to make a plan!). More urgent action is needed. For example, the Council could work with online retailers to install more parcel lockers around the city so that deliveries could be dropped at one point for people to collect.

Land and infrastructure

The glyphosate reduction trials in city parks are welcome but we would like to see this expanded. It is possible to manage parks and green spaces without using any chemical pesticides (herbicides, insecticides etc). Other local authorities are also managing their streets without using chemical pesticides and we would like to see the Council follow this best practice and phase out the use of all pesticides in the next five years.

Consumption and waste

The Council state that food waste is being separated from other household waste. How is this done? And is it as effective as a separate food waste collection would be? We are concerned that this is not the most effective way to manage household waste.

It is good to see that the Council intends to increase the choice of meals in schools, to address the climate impact of food. This should apply to all institutional settings, including hospitals, care homes and prisons, not only schools. Vegan options of similar nutritional value to other meal options should be made available for every meal.

Warm Homes Coalition

We have joined the WarmHomesLeics coalition, led by Climate Action Leicester and Leicestershire, along with other groups including The Race Equality Centre, Loughborough Climate Vigil and Muslim Green Guardians. This is part of a national campaign calling on the government to do the following:

• Roll out a street-by-street insulation programme
• Provide targeted financial help for people in fuel poverty
• Act to switch the UK to cheap, home-grown renewable energy
• Stop providing support for the fossil fuel industry

Find out more about how you can get involved here. 

Survey - tell us your views about your local park!

We've now completed our visits to the seven Leicester parks we are considering for the nature-friendly park award. We are going through all the information we have collected and writing up a report for the City Council, which will include some analysis of the questionnaires we conducted in the parks. If you didn't manage to come to any of our stalls, you can still share your views by completing the online version of the questionnaire here. 

Nature-friendly parks: an update

We're now over halfway through our parks assessments. After getting caught in a sudden deluge in Hamilton Park, we've been lucky with the weather and we've completed data collection in Evington, Spinney Hill, Willowbrook and Humberstone Parks. We'll be returning to Hamilton Park in July to conduct surveys of park users. 

Assessing the wildlife habitats in each park has been a fascinating experience. We've found a lot of diversity and some species that we didn't expect to see or hear. Two local botanists have accompanied us on these visits and conducted full plant surveys. A member of the local bat group has also been coming along to help us find and record bats and the keen birdwatchers in our group have been listening and looking for birds. We will share all of the information we have collected with the City Council. While we walk round, we all complete an assessment sheet with categories for wet areas, trees, grass management, flowers, bats, birds re-wilded areas, interpretation boards and harms (litter etc). One definite piece of good news is that we've seen no sign of herbicide use in the parks this year!

At our Saturday stalls, we've been conducting a questionnaire to find out people's experiences of nature in their local park and their opinions on the park's management. There will be an online version of this survey soon, if you've not managed to come along to one of our stalls and still want to have your say. To encourage people to come and talk to us, we've been making seed bombs with children (and some adults too), so that people can help to spread wildflowers in their gardens and their streets! These have been very popular. 

Finally, we've now come up with a definition for what we think constitutes a nature-friendly park, which we're using as a guide for our assessments:

A nature-friendly park creates as much space as possible for a diversity of wild plants, insects, birds and animals, while also being accessible to the surrounding human community and encouraging people to appreciate the wildlife on their doorstep. 

We'd love to hear what you think!

Highfields Centre garden spring clean

We've been back to the Highfields Centre garden for a spring clean. Everything has been growing well with the wet spring so we had to remove a lot of weeds and also do a big litter-pick, but it's now looking like a garden again!

March for the Earth - Earth Day

When in London can you see people dressed as parrots, giraffes, lions, tigers mixed in with foxes, and badgers all marching through the streets accompanied by birdsong being played on phones?

On Earth Day of course! Leicester Friends of the Earth joined thousands of people on the peaceful march through the streets of London on Earth Day (April 22^nd 2023) to raise awareness of the plight of nature due to global warming. 

It was a wonderful day, the sun shone, we met old and new friends, sang songs and listened to a speech by Chris Packham. We also took part in a ‘die-in’ where everyone lay down in the road looking at the sky, listening to the birdsong, left with their own thoughts about what we want for the planet – it was very emotive.

But although it was a wonderful day my daughter Hannah captured it all when she said - she looks forward to the day when we don’t have to march for nature – when everyone cares and fights to save the planet.

Dawn Chorus

 My alarm clock went off at 4.00am – it was ok – I wasn’t asleep. I hadn’t really slept at all – I was too excited, waiting to get up…I got up quickly, pulled on clothes, made toast and hot chocolate in a flask, then scurried out of the house with my daughter Hannah.

We had a short drive – a bit early for cycling so we used the electric car – and drove to Evington’s Arboretum.

It was still dark, as we walked in under the canopy of trees, I had to flick the torch on, so that we didn’t stumble…

We found a fallen tree trunk to sit on and listened…it was May 1^st – Dawn Chorus Day – and we were there to watch the sunrise and listen to the birds – they didn’t disappoint.

The Robins are the first to sing – always pre-dawn because they want to prove they are the toughest and can get through a cold night but be ready to sing for a mate before dawn. Then it is the Blackbirds, Wrens and Pigeons turn, followed by Song Thrush, Greenfinch and Warblers, last to join the party, as the sun rises, are the Blue Tits, Long Tailed Tits and Dunnocks as they are a bit nervous so wait for the sun.

And there it was rising above the horizon, heralding a new day and what a way to begin it – sitting on a tree trunk in an arboretum, drinking hot chocolate and listening to the birds singing…… 

Campaign video about pavement spraying

We have recently been lucky enough to work with students from Leicester College to put together a video about the spraying of pavements with glyphosate. We think this is a harmful practice and there are much better solutions - leave the wild plants alone and create more space for wildlife, or remove them with a wire brush when absolutely necessary. Check out our finished video here. 

Constructing accessible raised beds at Caribbean Court

To support Caribbean Court's gardening project, we applied for a grant from national Friends of the Earth's local groups fund and bought two raised beds. One has been designed for seated gardeners, including wheelchair users. The other is designed for standing gardeners, to help those who might have problems with bending. We constructed them on Saturday 15th April and delivered a load of compost and top soil, also bought with grant funding. The elders who use Caribbean Court will now be able to start gardening!

Our schedule of park visits for Friday evening surveys and Saturday afternoon stalls

To give an award to the most nature-friendly park, we need to assess their current state and survey people who use the park. This is our schedule for visiting each of the parks:   

	Fridays (evening visits looking at habitats)	Saturdays (stalls with questionnaire)
Hamilton	5th May	6th May
Evington	12th May	13th May
Spinney Hills	19th May	20th May
Willowbrook	26th May	27th May
Humberstone	9th June	10th June
Stokes Wood	16th June	17th June
Appleton	30th June	1st July
Reserve	7th July	8th July

Friday evenings in May will start at 7:30pm and in June at 8pm. We will be starting later in June as we are aiming to check bat populations so we need the twilight to arrive for them to come out.  

Our Saturday afternoon stalls will start at 3pm. We are aiming to survey park users while we entertain their children by making wildflower "seed bombs".

If you can spare the time to join us in any of the parks, especially if you are knowledgeable about an aspect of wildlife and can come along on a Friday evening, you would be very welcome to join us!

Announcing our award for the most nature-friendly park

We will be presenting an award to the most nature-friendly park in the city this summer.  The ‘Save our Wild Isles’ campaign, launched alongside David Attenborough’s new Wild Isles documentary series, encourages everyone to ‘go wild once a week’. We will be highlighting wildlife to visit on our doorsteps in Leicester.

There is so much excellent work happening in Leicester’s parks to encourage wildlife and we want to celebrate that. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world and more than one in seven of our native species is facing extinction. It is therefore more important than ever that we make space for nature in our cities. We need to allow wildlife to thrive alongside us. 

We will be looking at parks between 8 and 20 hectares, to ensure that we are not trying to compare the smallest and largest parks in the city and to make the process as fair as possible. We are creating an assessment scheme, working with local botanists, birdwatchers and ecologists, to determine how to choose the most nature-friendly park. We will look at the types of habitats in each park, from ponds to meadows to trees. We will visit each park twice, at different times of day, and try to record the species that they see and hear. (If you want to get involved in this work, please get in touch!)

We have also created a survey for park users, to collect their views on the space for nature in their local park and what else they would like to see. After the award has been presented, we will share the survey data with the City Council. 

When we visit each park, we will keep notes on the wildlife that we have seen and share them here on our blog and social media afterwards. We hope that this will encourage people to learn more about the biodiversity on their doorstep. It is widely recognised that feeling more connected to nature is beneficial for our mental health. We are also more likely to protect what we love. Where better to start learning more about nature than in your local park?

Green Book Reviews: The Third Plate by Dan Barber

The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber

As a permaculturist, the main message of this book made complete sense to me. Dan Barber argues that, rather than continuing to follow our current diet and striving to produce that food more sustainably, we should instead look at what food we can produce while supporting the health of our soils and ecosystems and then learn to cook well with that. Happily, food that is produced by flourishing ecosystems is always more nutritious and tastes better too. 

The book is divided into four parts: soil, land, sea and seed. Having been vegetarian and then vegan for a number of years, I found the land and sea sections more difficult to read than those that focussed on soil and seed. In particular, I was quite disgusted when the author admitted that he had known about the animal welfare concerns around foie gras for some time but had carried on using it in his kitchen anyway, due to the exceptional taste. To me, no taste can justify what amounts to torturing an animal. However, most of the discussion around eating meat and fish felt more balanced. The author admits that we need to eat much less meat and that we should eat the whole animal, rather than wasting much of it. The farms he applauds all treat their animals much better than ‘conventional’ industrial agriculture, allowing them to live a more natural life. If some people are going to continue to eat meat, the farms he visits provide a good model for how those animals can be reared. 

The soil section fitted perfectly with what I have learnt through permaculture about how to care for the soil. It provided a useful reminder of the importance of rotations and covering the soil as much as possible. Healthy soil always produces tastier food, as well as giving plants more resistance to pests and diseases. The seed section looks in detail at plant breeding (not to be confused with genetic modification) and warns that we should not be obsessed with fixed, heritage varieties but rather we should continue to encourage plant diversity and breed new varieties of vegetables and grains that are better adapted to our changing climate and that taste better. With more and more seed companies focussing on F1 seeds (the first generation of a hybrid cross, bred to be highly uniform), this was a useful message for gardeners: we should all be seeking out open pollinated seeds. 

The one thing that really lets this book down is the length. It felt to me like the author had obscured his message by providing too many anecdotes and repeating some of his points several times, which can be exasperating for the reader. In a few chapters, he introduces so many people (and describes so many meals!) that I found I’d lost the thread several times. This book could have had more impact if it were shorter.

Going peat free

 As the snowdrops break out in bloom, the daffodil shoots show and the seed catalogues drop on the mat our thoughts are turning to spring, that is just around the corner.  What will we grow?  What seeds do we need?  What compost will we grow them in?

This is the last year of retail sales of peat, with a ban on retail peat sales coming in 2024.  At last you may say!  Peat accumulates in waterlogged bogs at the rate of about 1mm per year, so it takes a 1,000 years to grow a metres depth of peat and yet we are getting through 3 million cubic metres of peat a year (DEFRA figure), nearly two-thirds of that being through retail sales of peat.  Peat holds more carbon than all the other carbon stores combined.  They are also a biodiversity hot-spot too, providing a home to countless types of plants and animal species

Why not make this year you only buy peat free compost?  There are an increasing number of peat free composts available as retailers prepare for the coming ban.  If you have a Which? subscription you will have access to the latest best buy guides that have just been published.

The bad news is that a ban on the use of peat by the horticultural industry is not expected until about 2030, so plants being sold in garden centres will often be grown in peat.  Peat is not fertile, it is only made fertile through the addition of fertiliser after it is harvested.  It is just a growing medium, so the creation of an alternative growing medium, with added fertiliser, is perfectly possible.  Peat use is more about cost (it’s cheap) than its performance comparted to peat free alternatives.

When buying plants this year why not check to see what compost they are grown in?  One of our most powerful campaigning tools is to decide how we spend our money.  It’s time to start checking the small print on that plant label and if it isn’t there start asking the retailer how the plants are grown. The power to change the horticulture industry over to peat free alternative composts is in our hands.

Lastly have you ever considered what compost our food is grown in?  It may surprise you to know that some foods, e.g. mushrooms, are grown on peat based compost. Where possible why not try and find out how your food is grown and steer clear of peat grown food?